Jimmy: you tell Tara to pop over here as I am into triggering and new life cycles, now that my trigger is in good working order, re Waterworks.Tara's message may have been deleted by Rose as spam or a touch of jealousitis.

All the world – and his book reviewer – says that Jonathan Franzen writes the “great American novel”.

If so, this all-American, very American story is to America what Danish pastry is to Denmark – not immediately recognizable in the country whose name it bears. Franzen takes the stereotype – every stereotype – and squeezes it so hard it becomes a dry lump of an idea of America.

So he has the liberal Good Samaritan couple next door; the flirtatious, badly behaved single mother; the clever child who has underage sex regularly with a neighbour two years older than him; the randy rock star who disdains publicity;

the pretty and loving Bengali girl whose accent is a bit chee-chee; the rich Jewish family; their bored and beautiful daughter who expects to marry into the style she’s accustomed to;

Halliburton-esque military contractors sending astoundingly useless and outrageously expensive equipment to GIs in Iraq; the Republican smartie pants who play and win on Wall Street. And on and on and on.

Franzen takes every idea that anyone ever thought symbolized America after the Twin Towers attack and moulds it into this single volume, American-style Forsyte saga.

Like John Galsworthy’s three-novel “Forsyte Saga”, it addresses timeworn themes such as duty versus desire and generational change.

So far so good. But then like an American-style “Tracts for the Times”, which led the 19th century English movement for the Protestant Reformation, Franzen’s “Freedom” veers crazily into environmental activism, population control and the excesses of conservative Republicanism.

Along the way, Patty and Walter, the liberal couple that is the centerpiece – falls apart; their clever son marries – and finds he really really loves – the adoring, slightly boneheaded girl he’s been sleeping with since he was a tweenager.

There is enough mobility – through cities, professions, relationships – to keep it all discernibly 21st century American.

But is it? It is a parody of America. The world’s idea of America, over-privileged, under-entitled.

Franzen, who was recently on the cover of TIME magazine, is being described as the heir to Bellow, Updike and Roth. He certainly writes well. Patty, for instance, is described as “a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee...famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else” in an acerbic, unassailably true take on liberal yuppies.

His mother, a beautiful American named Jennie Jerome, "devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, slipping between the sheets with handsome, powerful men in Britain, in the United States, and on the Continent.

Toye acknowledges Churchill's pathological aversion to India and how he wished Partition upon the subcontinent.

"The mere mention of India," he writes, "brought out a streak of unpleasantness or even irrationality in Churchill.

In March 1943, R A Butler, the education minister, visited him at Chequers. The prime minister 'launched into a most terrible attack on the 'baboos', saying that they were gross, dirty and corrupt.

He even declared that he wanted the British to leave India, and – this was a more serious remark – that he supported the principle of Pakistan.

When Butler argued that the Raj had always stood for Indian unity, Churchill replied, 'Well, if our poor troops have to be kept in a sweltering, syphilitic climate for the sake of your precious unity, I'd rather see them have a good civil war.' "

Toye devotes less than three pages to Churchill's malign role in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44.

Britain's plunder of India is dispensed with equally briskly: "One factor that increased Churchill's resentment towards India was the issue of the sterling balances.

These were British debts chalked up in London in exchange for goods and services required for the war effort.

These grew, in total, from £1,299 million in December 1941 to £3,355 million in June 1945, of which around one-third was owed to India.

From one perspective, this was very good news for the UK. She was, in effect, extracting an enormous forced loan which she was unlikely to have to repay in the near future."

Globally, reviewers have called this biography "revisionist". It is not. It exposes Churchill's warts but, often in the same paragraph, presents a contextual justification for them.

The concluding lines of Toye's book reveal where his sympathies lie: "The decline of Churchill's Empire, much as the man himself regretted it, can be seen in part as a tribute to the power of beliefs that he himself prized dearly."

It is a disappointing end to a biography that sets out to critically re-examine Churchill but fails the final test, unheroically, like Churchill himself.

(The writer is the biographer of Rajiv Gandhi)

Read more: Why Churchill had an aversion to India - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/book-mark/Why-Churchill-had-an-aversion-to-India/articleshow/6674438.cms#ixzz11xhE2R73

About Me

Ardent family orientated bloke,love my family lots.
Love Australia my Beautiful adopted country, but remember passionately my home village, Chalgrove in Oxfordshire, England. My favourite friends would include several shipmates I am in close contact with who served with me while in the British Royal Navy ..going back a fair bit.
There is also the silence of my age, too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it - in words intelligible to those who have not lived-the great range of my life.
Vest.GSM, LSGCM, WM, B/PM, ITM, UNM, K-N M, EOW M, Asia- PAC M. ROYAL NAVY 25yrs, Retired.